I remember standing there for what seemed like a long time looking down, wondering what all this meant, wondering if it could possibly mean anything. All those people senselessly, needlessly dead. Now one more.
I thought about Esme’s face falling away from me. Wondered if all my life that’s what people would be doing: falling away from me, leaving. I was closer to the truth than I could know.
Over the next years, through many more departures, through the ruins of a marriage, sitting in Joe’s or Binx’s, in the Spasm Jazzbar or bars down along Dryades where Buster was playing, I’d think about that a lot. For a while that’s about all I did. Read during the day, drink and think at night. Then the nights started advancing on the days.
I’d cracked my head on the parapet when I lunged to try to catch him, and standing there looking over the edge-it couldn’t have been long, though it seemed that way-I felt myself tipping forward, dizzy. I stepped back, something hit me, and suddenly I was looking at sky.
Pale blue, bright. Puffy white clouds tacking slowly through it. Birds askitter.
Then something black that started at the center, grew, flew toward me, erased it all.
LaVerne’s face was above me when I awoke. No sky now, only a chipped plaster ceiling, but that same pale blue. And voices that for a terrifying moment seemed not outside but within me.
“Lew? Can you hear me? Do you remember what happened?”
Other voices behind hers, all of them crowded together and indistinguishable. The whole world, when I opened my eyes again, flat, as though all its surfaces had been skimmed away and pasted onto cardboard.
I tried to clear my throat. They’d sealed it over somehow. Plaster, cement, Superglue. Rolled the stone back in place. For the love of God, Montressor.
I tried again and managed Gurg.
“Gurg yourself.”
I wanted to tell her that ladies shouldn’t talk that way, but it was going to have to wait.
Sometime later I resurfaced. Light still in the room, but dimmer now, tentative. Things gone gray, beginning to lose edges. Morning? Early evening? I turned my head to the door just in time to meet the pain and darkness rushing toward me. Sank back into that. So much easier. A simpler world.
“Lewis. Lewis.”
They were dredging the dark waters for me. I drifted up again, weightless, up toward the light.
“Lew?”
“Luffen fill mecurr.”
“What, honey?”
I tried again. “Love and feel my care.”
“Don’t I, though.” She smiled, put her hand against my cheek, leaned in to kiss me. “You’re going to be okay.”
“Never have been.”
“Yeah, well. The truth is, you have, Lew. You just never knew it.”
“Where am I?”
“Touro. You were pursuing Carl Joseph.”
A few static scenes staggered back, like snapshots. That narrow steel ladder. Obstacles. Clouds and blue sky. Coming up over the rim of the roof.
Then all of it.
“The shooter.”
She nodded.
“When you rushed him, he went off the roof. Your head went into the wall. Fair contest, but the wall was harder. You have a concussion, Lew. It’s serious.”
It was serious, all right.
Verne believed that I had pursued the shooter and purposely killed him. So did the newspapers. Everyone believed I had intentionally killed him, I discovered in days to come. Again, as with Corene Davis, though this time not so anonymously, I’d become a kind of cut-rate folk hero.
Eventually I gave up trying to set others straight, gave up telling them again and again what actually happened. And after a while I wasn’t sure anymore that, at some level, I hadn’t hunted him down and intentionally killed him.
“How long have you been here, Verne? How long was I out?”
“Two days.”
She held a glass for me. Tepid water, an accordion-pleated straw. I drank with difficulty. My mouth and throat were a wasteland.
“You knew him, Verne.”
After a pause: “Yes, I did.”
“There was a red dress hanging on a hook against one wall. I’ve seen you wear it.”
Another pause. “He was a friend, Lew.”
“A friend. Like I’m a friend?”
She shook her head. “No. Not like that at all.” She looked away, then back to me. “I didn’t know the rest. Walsh told me.”
She held up the glass again for me, I drank and drifted off again.
Rushmore faces were there from time to time when I floated back up: Hosie Straughter, the Beret Brothers, Corene Davis, Elroy Weaver, Walsh, LaVerne. I was awake and dreaming at the same time. I don’t know how much of this was real, how much imagined.
Walsh told me: You did it, Lew.
The Beret Brothers: The community thanks you, man. We all do.
And LaVerne said: You’re important to me, Lew, more important than you’ll ever know.
That part wasn’t imagined.